Expected, but still insanely cool: Canonical has just announced Ubuntu for phones. This is a new mobile phone operating system, with its own user interface and development platform. It's built around Qt5 and QML, and the interface reminds me of MeeGo on the N9. It's supposed to be on the shelves in early 2014, but the developer preview is out today.

I'm not entirely sure and I'm not particularly good at dissecting legal documents.

That'd probably be a good question for someone on the Mono team though.

But the Community Promise is a framework they use to cover other standards there, some funnily not viewed in such a controversial light as C#. I don't think it can be that people feel safe to implement those standards and not C#, given they're under the same promise.

There's a lot of FUD around this. Microsoft has made a legally binding promise not to assert any patents related to the implementation of the ECMA standards.

However, Microsoft emphatically makes no such promise in relation to other parts of .NET (specifically, libraries such as Winforms) which are commonly called up by source code of applications written in C#. Therefore, there are essentially no applications written in C# which can run on platforms not sanctioned by Microsoft. This fact utterly destroys any claims to "cross-platform" which are commonly made in relation to C#.

Qt, QML and HTML5, OTOH, are truly cross-platform (except for paarts of HTML5 which Microsoft refuses to support, such as, unsurprisingly, HTML5 forms prior to IE10). Anyone can write a platform which implements these, and anyone can write applications which utilise these, targeting any such platform, without having to pay "rent" to overlord corporations (such as Microsoft) for the right to do so.

Hence, Ubuntu for phones. It makes perfect economic sense for a vendor to choose that over C#, every day of the week.

"There's a lot of FUD around this. Microsoft has made a legally binding promise not to assert any patents related to the implementation of the ECMA standards.

However, Microsoft emphatically makes no such promise in relation to other parts of .NET (specifically, libraries such as Winforms) which are commonly called up by source code of applications written in C#. Therefore, there are essentially no applications written in C# which can run on platforms not sanctioned by Microsoft. This fact utterly destroys any claims to "cross-platform" which are commonly made in relation to C#.
"

C# is cross platform, your fear of getting sued is the only thing holding you back. You could have patent suits levelled against you for basically any piece of software, so you should be equally as fearful of Qt/GTK/WxWidgets/etc.

Look at Apple/Samsung: different platforms, different languages, different libraries, but still the suit was successful (agree or disagree with it).